LIU Ads Dominating Penn Station

If you have been to Penn Station recently, I’m sure you have noticed all of the ads for Long Island University. There are 70 ads in Penn station alone, viewable in the Long Island Railroad waiting room, railroad platforms, escalators, lobbies, corridors, hall- ways, and stairwell. LIU has definitely dominated Penn Station.

Yet, I don’t think these ads will make a huge difference in our enrollment. 7,305 graduate and undergraduate students were enrolled at Post in 2011. 7,126 graduate and undergraduate students were enrolled in the fall of 2012. That’s 179 fewer students enrolled, nine months after the rebranding campaign began. Will a picture of a random unknown student, with the caption “Find out how good you really are” persuade people in making the choice to attend a college? I don’t even think Post itself is too confident in our ads boosting enrollment, especially since they are shutting down Kings Hall next year and offering single housing.

Why is all this money being spent on advertisement? The money that is being dumped into these obnoxious ads could be used to improve our campus, the place many of us call home. We have crumbling stairs between Brookville Hall and the Suites, Chipmunk Trail still has fallen trees from October’s Hurricane Sandy, the walkway by the chapel needs to be paved, the dorm buildings don’t have wifi, the parking lot behind the suites is still ripped up, washers and dryers go months with an “out of service” sign taped to them, the game rooms have stained carpets, some of our classrooms have old desks, many students complain about the dining situation on campus, and not to mention that some of our university signs here on Long Island, still have not been changed from C.W. to LIU.

“Definitely, it would be better if all the money spent on advertising could be spent on our school, because I feel like, as a student, we still have a lot of things for our use [that] could be better. Like the classroom and all that stuff could be more updated,” said Ada Lee, a senior Clinical Laboratory major. “Advertis- ing does help, but is it necessary for all over? I think it is something that we need to be con- cerned about. Advertising is good, but not that much. We should cut off some.”

“They should be spending it on better stuff; they shouldn’t be wasting our money on advertisement in Penn Station,” said Ketan Parmar, a freshman Computer Science major. “They should be spending it more on our education and our food, something that helps us as students. They should improve the media lab and the computer lab; just have more resources available for us. That’d be nice. They should make the dorms a little nicer, cleaner, and smell nicer too. That’d be great.”

Will these ads bring the results that the University is hoping for? Parmar offers his pros and cons regarding the university’s intensive advertising campaign. “Yes and no. Yes in the way that it tells people we’re here, we’re alive, we are Post, we got Post pride. But no, because we are wasting our money, we really don’t need to endorse that much.” It is hard to say whether or not all these ads will make people pick our school over another. Having great ads to represent us is nice, but you should fix things at the home base first instead of paying all this money to put ads not just in Penn Station, but also in Herald Square; billboards; Times Square; LIRR cars; the Theatre District; bus shelters in Suffolk, Nassau, Queens; NYC subway cars; malls (Roosevelt, Broadway and Walt Whitman); and newspapers.